A Quiet Vendetta

‘It’s something,’ Hartmann said. ‘It takes me in the direction of the son… well, at least someone other than Perez also being involved, and the son seems the most likely possibility.’

‘We ain’t gonna know until we know, that’s the real truth,’ Schaeffer said.

‘And we still have the wrong name – or what we can consider to be the wrong name. If the wife and daughter were called Perez then that name would have come up,’ Woodroffe said.

‘I’m having people follow up on the car bombing. Chicago, March of ’91. If it happened, there will be details – names, reports, documents that we can access. I imagine we will have word on it within the hour.’ Schaeffer leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms out beside him. He looked exhausted. ‘Don’t know about you guys, but I could manage a steak and whatever else comes with it. Feel like I haven’t had a decent meal in a week.’

‘Sounds good,’ Woodroffe said. He stood up and retrieved his jacket from the back of his chair.

Hartmann rose also. He figured no harm could be done. What else would he do? Head back to the Marriott, watch TV, fall asleep in his clothes thinking about Jess and Carol and wake in the early hours of the morning with a bitch of a headache?

‘Any suggestions?’ Schaeffer asked. ‘This is more your town than ours.’

‘Vieux Carre… old New Orleans side of the city. They have some great restaurants.’

‘Good enough,’ Woodroffe said. ‘We’ll leave Ross here. I’ll make sure he has all the numbers and tell him to call as soon as he gets word back on the Chicago bombing.’

The three of them left by the front entrance. Ross was located and briefed on the situation, the information that was expected.

He and three other agents stayed behind in the office to take calls, to inform Schaeffer and Woodroffe if anything came up that would require their attention. Once again, the obvious absence of so many of the field operatives reminded Hartmann of the money and manpower that were being devoted to this. Those teams had been out for days, and not one of them had come back with anything substantial.

‘Bring me a take-out or something, eh?’ Sheldon Ross called after Hartmann, and Hartmann turned and raised his hand.

‘Next time you come with us,’ Hartmann called from the doorway. ‘And we’ll talk about how to find you an FBI girl that looks like Meg Ryan!’

Ross laughed and waved as Hartmann disappeared. He turned back and headed for the central office within the complex.

They took Schaeffer’s nondescript gray sedan, as much an advertisement for the Bureau as a red Pontiac Firebird, but still they insisted on using them. Hartmann sat up front, Woodroffe in the back, and Hartmann directed Schaeffer away from Arsenault towards the old side of the city.

There was much for him to remember, although he tried his best not to. Thoughts came thick and fast, with them images: he and Danny, his mother, even a memory of his father that he believed he’d forgotten. It was close to the bone, always had been perhaps, but Hartmann had somehow managed to bury it in the believed importances of his own life. Roots were roots, weren’t they? Everybody has roots, he thought, and then remembered that that had been a line from a poem by William Carlos Williams that Carol had been so fond of. He believed there was a fragment of hope for his marriage, and certainly there was no lack of love from his daughter. She missed him. She had said that, as clear as daylight. She missed him. His heart soared when he thought of her, the sound of her voice still echoing inside his head. But Carol had doubts. She’d said that. That she had doubts. She said he should call her when he got back to New York, and then she would see how she felt. Looking from the window along the streets of his past, he could hear her voice as if she had been sitting right behind him, almost as if he could have turned and looked right back at her in that very moment…

The memory of her voice and the image of her face were broken up then, and at first it seemed that he was imagining something. They had just taken a left turn towards Iberville and Treme, and the sound that came up behind them was like a tidal wave. There was no way to describe it, but it took Hartmann’s attention by surprise, and he turned suddenly and involuntarily to look out of the rear window.

Woodroffe was looking too. They saw it together, and though there might have been words to describe what they saw those words were never voiced.

Smoke seemed to rush upwards from the ground like a tornado in reverse. And then there was another sound, like a hundred thousand cannons going off at once, and Schaeffer slammed on the brakes and hit the curb with force.

‘What the living fu-’ he started, and then there was something like a slow-motion dawning realization, and after that came a sense of recognition, and close on the heels of everything came an awareness that none of them could even begin to comprehend.

‘Ross,’ Schaeffer said, but it was more like a sound than someone’s name, and he slowed the car, pulled it into reverse, skidded one hundred and eighty degrees in the middle of the street and started back the way they had come. He hit sixty or seventy by the time he reached the junction at the end, Hartmann leaning forward to see through the windscreen. Woodroffe was behind him, his hands gripping the rear of the passenger seat, and the nearer they got to Arsenault Street the more they realized that whatever was waiting there for them was not something they wished to see.

A hundred yards from the Field Office the smoke obscured everything. Schaeffer pulled to the side of the road, opened the door and started running immediately his feet hit the ground. Hartmann came up behind him, Woodroffe following, but within fifteen yards the pall of black and acrid smoke prevented them making any further progress. The heat was unbearable, like an inferno, and all Hartmann could think of was that they would have been within it had they left no more than ten minutes later.

Schaeffer was at the side of the road doubled up. He was gasping for air. Woodroffe dragged him back, shouting something unintelligible over the roar of flames, and when he turned Hartmann realized that he needed help bringing Schaeffer back to the car.

‘Radio!’ he was screaming at the top of his voice. ‘Gotta get back to the fucking radio!’

Hartmann could barely co-ordinate himself. He felt sick, not only with the smoke and the heat but with the import of what was happening around him. Then he remembered Ross and the other men, the men they’d left behind to take messages while they drove out to the restaurant. Impulse and instinct drove him towards the source of the heat, but survival inhibited him. He knew there was no way he would make it five yards closer to the Field Office.

Suddenly another sound, like something being wrenched wholesale from the ground, and Hartmann heard shattering glass, echoing all around him, and when he felt another rush of heat he threw himself to the ground and covered his head. It was like a hurricane passing over; he felt sure the hair on the back of his head was scorched. He lay there for a moment, and then he heard Woodroffe’s voice again, screaming for him to get up, to get back to the car and call for help.

Hartmann rolled over. The sky was black above him. He lay on his side for a second, and then with every ounce of strength he possessed he forced himself up onto his feet and ran back towards the sedan.

The three of them made it back within seconds, and even as Woodroffe snatched the radio handset from the dash, even as he started shouting into the mouthpiece, Hartmann heard sirens. They were coming from his left, and he turned and saw flashing cherry-blue bars through the smoke. He could hear the thunder of flames behind him, relentless and deafening, and he sat down on the road, his back against the side of the car, and held his hands over his ears. His eyes were streaming with tears, a sharp burning sensation in his chest, and when he started to breathe deeply he felt the acidic smoke scorching the inside of his throat and nostrils.

Later, from evidence, from Crime Scene Investigation reports, from everything they could gather without any eyewitnesses, it seemed that a suitcase had been hurled through the door of the FBI Office on Arsenault Street. Forensics and Bomb Squad estimated there must have been eight or ten pounds of C4 plastic explosive packed inside that case. It was a simple detonation. The impact of the case landing in the foyer would have been enough to trigger it, and the force of the explosion took out the majority of the building’s lower floor and much of the first. It also resulted in the deaths of Sheldon Ross, Michael Kanelli, Ron Sawyer and James Landreth. Every shred of evidence, every report, every document, every tape and transcript, every piece of recording equipment was destroyed too, but in that moment – as Hartmann, Schaeffer and Woodroffe watched flames bursting out from the back of the building – their only thought was for the men who had stayed behind.

None of them spoke. Dinner was forgotten. Medics came down from New Orleans City Hospital and checked